they whispered, the refrain Was like a willow swept by rain. Anon, their lamps’ uplifted flame Revealed Susanna and her shame. And then, the simpering Byzantines Fled, with a noise like tambourines. IV Beauty is momentary in the mind— The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body’s beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done

A human thing. It is an eminence, But of nothing, trash of sleep that will disappear With the special things of night, little by little, In day’s constellation, and yet remain, yet be, XXI Not father, but bare brother, megalfrere, Or by whatever boorish name a man Might call the common self, interior fons. And fond, the total man of glubbal glub, Political tramp with an heraldic air, XXII Cloud-casual, metaphysical metaphor, But resting on me, thinking in my snow, Physical

honky-tonk out of the somnolent grasses Is a memorizing, a trying out, to keep. II We make, although inside an egg, Variations on the words spread sail. The morning-glories grow in the egg. It is full of the myrrh and camphor of summer And Adirondack glittering. The cat hawks it And the hawk cats it and we say spread sail, Spread sail, we say spread white, spread way. The shell is a shore. The egg of the sea And the egg of the sky are in shells, in walls, in skins And the

the sunshine placidly, colored by ground Obliquities of those who pass beneath, Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form, Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit. So Crispin hasped on the surviving form, For him, of shall or ought to be in is. Was he to bray this in profoundest brass Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems? Was he to company vastest things defunct With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky? Scrawl a tragedian’s

an affectation of mind, The mannerism of nature caught in a glass And there become a spirit’s mannerism, A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can. SONG OF FIXED ACCORD Rou-cou spoke the dove, Like the sooth lord of sorrow, Of sooth love and sorrow, And a hail-bow, hail-bow, To this morrow. She lay upon the roof, A little wet of wing and woe, And she rou-ed there, Softly she piped among the suns And their ordinary glare, The sun of five, the sun of six, Their